Her central character, Tookie, is a indigenous woman released from a disproportionality long incarceration. In prison Tookie found solace in books sent to her by a former teacher. Outside she finds solace working in a bookshop and the characters she meets there. One of them, Flora, dies on All Souls' Day 2019, and begins to haunt the shop. Tookie struggles to understand why Flora's spirit has done this - she was the shops "most annoying" customer, someone who desperately wanted to associate herself with being Native American, but was also fiercely loyal.
As the pandemic grows and bookshops become essential places of work, Tookie's shop becomes the focus of a narrowing world - a lifeline to other times and places for its customers. Their stock of books about indigenous culture is highly in demand, reflecting the transformation in political ideas that Black Lives Matter sparks. Through Tookie's search to understand Flora's death and haunting, Erdrich explores the meaning of literature, bookshops and books. Readers are perhaps meant to ask themselves what these things mean to us, in a world buffeted by violence and chaos.
The problem is that it doesn't work. One can only assume that Tookie's constant referencing of books and authors, and the associated reading list at the end is designed to blur the lives between fiction and reality. But to me it came across as smug and preachy. Black Lives Matter feels like a backdrop for a plot point, not a transformative social experience that shifted politics in the US - though the descriptions of the chaos of anger of the demonstrations feels accurate.
The book left me unsatisfied. Perhaps I was trying to hard to work out what it all meant rather than going along for the ride. But it felt like an opportunity to discuss the deep seated racism at the heart of US society - racism that rose on the back of the genocide against Native Americans and slavery - was lost in a story that didn't quite work for this reader.
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